Did you take part in Earth Hour last month? On the 24th of March each year a big part of the earth’s population in the most energy consuming countries turn the lights off for one hour to stress the en

Mark Jaccard, Professor in the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University, VancouverAbstractThere are obvious reasons why for three decades most jurisdictions have failPublic surveys and observation of real-world GHG reduction successes suggest that explicit carbon pricing (carbon tax and perhaps cap-and-trade) can be substantially more politically difficult than certain regulatory policies for shifting the energy system on to a deep decarbonization trajectory. Nonetheless, some people have argued that carbon pricing is an essential GHG reduction policy, suggesting that sincere politicians must do carbon pricing no matter how politically difficult. But the claim that carbon pricing is essential is factually incorrect. Deep decarbonization can be achieved entirely with regulations. Regulatory policies are unlikely to be as economically efficient as carbon pricing. But not all regulations perform identically when it comes to the economic-efficiency criterion. Flexible regulations have some attributes that make them low cost relative to regulations that require adoption of specific technologies.This talk provides evidence that assesses both the relative economic efficiency of policies and their relative political acceptability. The findings reported here suggest that some kinds of flexible regulations can perform significantly better than explicit carbon pricing in terms of relative political cost per tonne reduced while performing only marginally worse in terms of economic cost per tonne reduced. Presumably, this type of trade-off information could be of value to politicians who sincerely want deep decarbonization but would also like to be rewarded with re-election so that they and competing politicians see the value in ambitious and sustained GHG reduction efforts.

This paper examines whether a hidden potential for rural population growth can be found in Sweden through investigating survey data of people expressing their desire to move to rural areas, and regist

Workshop talk: War and cultural property in the era of identity wars by Frederik Rosén

Frederik Rosen from the Centre for Advanced Studies at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, talks about the gap between the growing international discourse on the topic of cultural property a

Futures: Politics and psychology - how to gain support for climate policies

Combating climate change means implementing policies that will encourage people to act in a more sustainable way. But how can policies be constructed and implemented in a way that is acceptable to the

The purpose of this project is to investigate the relevance of empirical results for the philosophy of mathematics.

In 2016 dozens of prominent researchers from around the world came to our institute to work on the ambitious research report "Rethinking society for the 21st century" by the International Panel on Soci. One of the many interesting researchers we had the pleasure of hosting was Daniel Wikler, Professor of Ethics and Population Health.

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 68(2), 2017: 485-533. Abstract The desirability of what actually occurs is often influenced by what could have been. Preferences based on such value de

The Review of Politics, 81(3), 435-457. doi:10.1017/S0034670519000214 Abstract The “demos paradox” is the idea that the composition of a demos could never secure democratic legitimacy because the composi

Noûs 53 (1), 3-22 Abstract How do we get out knowledge of the natural numbers? Various philosophical accounts exist, but there has been comparatively little attention to psychological data on how the lea